Chinese vs. Japanese

[Lalato]

What are the implications of this article on a campaign setting? How would one integrate the Chinese way of creating foreign words with the native alphabet vs. the Japanese way of creating an entirely new alphabet for foreign words?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/17/international/asia/17ASIA.html?8hpib

warning: you will have to register with the site, but it is free

EDIT: Alternately, the article can be found here without registration: http://www.iht.com/articles/510685.html

 

[Liminal Syzygy]

Heh, quite an oversimplification of a complex issue, that article... but anyway you are asking about the language.

First thing is that Japanese didn't create katakana specifically for foreign words so it isn't "an alphabet created for foriegn words". That is simply how it is (mostly) used these days.

Another point is that these "foreign words" are actually quite integrated into the Japanese language. The picture with the article shows a "First Kitchen" - those words are rendered into katakana as they are not native words, however this is a Japanese chain. Sony writes their name in katakana as well.

I guess the equivalent for the campaign setting would be if the players move into a new culture, would the natives try to pronounce their native names, even mangling it if they can't get the pronunciation just right, or would they assign local names? Whether that be a non-related local name, a local name with a similar pronunctiation to the original name (or as close as they can make it) or a tribal-sounding name something like "Wolf on the Horizon"

 

[Dragonblade]

I don't care for sites that require registration so I haven't read the article. Can someone post a copy of it in this thread?

I don't know how the Chinese create foreign words, but I lived in Japan and speak Japanese so I know the Japanese use a separate alphabet called Katakana for their foreign words.

Katakana was developed by monks who invented the characters to let them transliterate Chinese texts. Slightly different from the use it has today.

Hiragana was developed by women of the court for writing prose and poetry. Men generally wrote directly with Chinese characters. Although over time, hiragana became used more and more for denoting Japanese grammatical structure within sentences composed of Chinese characters, or Kanji as the Japanese refer to it.

And Katakana was relegated more and more to writing foreign words in Japanese. However, Katakana is used in Japanese texts or advertising today even with native Japanese words to draw attention to them. Much the same way we might bold or italicize text.

 

[Dragonblade]

Another point is that these "foreign words" are actually quite integrated into the Japanese language. The picture with the article shows a "First Kitchen" - those words are rendered into katakana as they are not native words, however this is a Japanese chain. Sony writes their name in katakana as well.

This is an excellent point. Katakana words are fully integrated into Japanese society.

For example, テレビ is pronounced TE-RE-BI and is basically Televi(sion) abbreviated and written in Japanese.

AFAIK, there is no native Japanese word for Television. Their word for it is basically our word for it.

 

[Darkness]

I don't care for sites that require registration so I haven't read the article.

Me neither so I searched news.google.com.

To those who registered -
Is this similar to, or even the same as, the article mentioned in the original post?

 

[Lalato]

Me neither so I searched news.google.com.

To those who registered -
Is this similar to, or even the same as, the article mentioned in the original post?

Yes... that is the same article.
--sam

 

[Lalato]

I guess the equivalent for the campaign setting would be if the players move into a new culture, would the natives try to pronounce their native names, even mangling it if they can't get the pronunciation just right, or would they assign local names? Whether that be a non-related local name, a local name with a similar pronunctiation to the original name (or as close as they can make it) or a tribal-sounding name something like "Wolf on the Horizon"

Yes... that's what I was thinking... it might be interesting to see this in a campaign. I think it might also be a good source of humor when Ronan the Barbarian becomes... Little Mouse of the Field...

--sam

 

[Dragonblade]

I agree that the article is a gross oversimplification of a complex issue. And although there was once a time when being foreign meant being stigmatized as non-Japanese, now being non-Japanese is considered quite cool.

Like Cordo said, Sony writes their corporate name in Katakana in Japan, and Sony is the pinnacle of cool when it comes to Japanese companies and products within Japan.

Chinese writing foreign words in Chinese or Japanese writing them in Katakana doesn't really mean anything anymore. And the author's implication that writing words in Katakana is a hindrance to Japanese culture and business is dead wrong, IMO.

 

[shadow]

Well, since I'm a linguistics major doing a minor in Japanese and currently studying Chinese I'm obligated to reply.

First of all Chinese is an isolating language. That means that there are no inflectional endings on words. In English we add endings to show tense and aspect. For example the sentences "I eat", "I am eating", "I have eaten" show how endings on the verb change the meaning. In Chinese, instead of adding endings to words, seperate words are inserted in the sentences.
Also Chinese has a large number of morphemes, that is units of speech that still retain a meaning. So Chinese morphemes can be combined together in compounds to create words. (Much like English compound words, only there are many more of them in Chinese.)
Because of this, the Chinese language is well suited for a character based writing system. Contrary to popular belief, each Chinese character is not a word, rather each character represents a morpheme-a combination of sound and meaning. Most (although not all) Chinese words are made up of one or more characters. For example, the word for telephone is dìanhùa. It is made up of two characters - dìan (meaning electricity) and hùa (meaning speech or talking).

Originally Chinese characters made there way to Japan via Korea. Since Japan didn't have any writing system prior to that time, they were adopted for writing Japanese. However, the problem was that unlike Chinese, Japanese is an agglutinating language, that is a language where suffixes are attatched to words. Some Japanese word can have quite a few suffixes. For example kakaseraremaa is a single word meaning "was made to write". (The stem is the verb kak(u))
Originally Chinese characters were used exclusively. One Chinese character was used for the stem of the word, and others were used for the endings. Characters used for the ending on words were chosen only for the phonetic element (that is the sound the character represented) and any meaning the character originally had was disgarded. The problem was that this method was really cumbersome. Some characters had meaning, others simply represented sounds. Moreover, it was very slow to write.
Hiragana and Katakana are the two Japanese phonetic "alphabets" (More technically they're syllabries since each sound represents a syllable.) They were developed independantly. Hiragana was originally a cursive style of Chinese characters, hence it looks more fluid. Katakana was developed as a shorthand for Buddhist monks. It takes only part of the Chinese character and discards the rest, so it is quicker to write.

In modern Japanese, both the Kana and Chinese characters are used. Chinese characters are used for Chinese loan words and also for many verbs where the Chinese character is used for the stem and hiragana is used for the ending. Also Katakana has come to be used for transcribing foreign words phonetically or for emphasis on native Japanese words (much like italics.)

Anyway, hope that this makes sense!

 

[Lalato]

I agree that the article is a gross oversimplification of a complex issue. And although there was once a time when being foreign meant being stigmatized as non-Japanese, now being non-Japanese is considered quite cool.

Like Cordo said, Sony writes their corporate name in Katakana in Japan, and Sony is the pinnacle of cool when it comes to Japanese companies and products within Japan.

Chinese writing foreign words in Chinese or Japanese writing them in Katakana doesn't really mean anything anymore. And the author's implication that writing words in Katakana is a hindrance to Japanese culture and business is dead wrong, IMO.

While appreciate your opinion on this, Dragonblade... let's try to keep it within the context of the original question. Based on the ideas presented in the article, what are the implications for a campaign world?